XV. A Weary Traveler & A Waffle House

3:47 AM * March 22, 2004

Sitting in my favorite booth at Waffle House, an overweight woman named Candy, deprived of teeth and from what I can gather, any true sense of dignity, brings me my fifth cup of coffee in less than a half-hour. As I usually do, I reach into the inner pocket of my denim jacket to find my snakeskin flask. I take one more familiar waft of Johnny Walker Red Label before I pour the remaining liquid into my new coffee. But just then, I catch a reflection in the calm surface of my beverage - it is that of a man lacking any real identity, or identifiable emotion. A man that became lost in the slow years that seem to pass like the last drips of morphine that fall onto the floor until that man that knew himself so well realizes that there is nothing left to find within himself but fear and despair. Rather, the infiniteness of retrospection has left him feeling so insignificant that his life seems more meaningless with each passing second on his father’s old wristwatch. He is nothing but one flake of snow that passes in a multitude of winter storms that define an era.

It is in this instant when I realize that there is a homeless man proclaiming himself to be the Prince of Wales standing over me reeking of the all too familiar scent of dead flowers mixed with soiled laundry. I ask the man to be seated "to calm down" but that only arouses more anger as he insists on taking his clothes off one article at a time, starting with his underwear. I tell the man that he has 2 minutes to convince me of his importance to this world or I will be quick to end his life. He then has a seat, reaches into his pocket, places a strip of LSD on his tongue, and begins to speak.

As he starts, I anticipate a cheap laugh, for which I am willing to spend $10 to send him to his next bottle of hooch and failed crime attempt. Yet there is something tender in his speech: The sort of caring that had escaped me over the years creating the shell of a man that I had come to embrace as a hardened long-haul truck driver for Penguin Publishing Co. He told me tall tales of magical beanstalks, trains made of marshmallows, life in Quaker country, a clock that told time backwards that his uncle had given him, and many more tales of ribaldry. Alas I soiled myself because I was unable to bring myself to leave the table, afraid to miss even a second of him spilling his mind out for me.

When he finally stopped speaking, some sixteen hours later, I felt like a new man. I arose from my seat, offered him his promised money, slicked back my hair, walked him into the parking lot, and told him I would give him a ride anywhere he wished, so long as he lay in the trunk of my car that I drive between trucking trips because he smelled so awful.

Having been on roughly 17 days without sleep, I decided it best to go home for a spell. When I awoke, it was 3 days later, and I set out across the country once more. That was over 2 years ago. This morning, I opened my trunk for the first time since I met that man that proclaimed to be the Prince of Wales to find that a horrific sight awaited me. He had strangled himself to death some time after I had forgotten about him and the smell that greeted me when I popped the trunk of my Oldsmobile burned my nostrils like the rush of cayenne pepper that I had snorted only moments before. Believe it or not, I can’t shake the feeling that I was somehow responsible for the demise of that man. For what it’s worth though, I’d like to think that night had just as much of an impact on his life as it did on mine.